Friday, December 09, 2011

"Remember, they are not really banks in the sense we used to have them in this country. You know, private sector entities not dependent on the state. Chinese banks are now like banks in the west. Or rather, banks in the west are now like banks in China."

Monday, December 05, 2011

The surroundings are shaking and the so called businessman in smart clothing is neither an industrialist nor an entrepreneur. He has no emotional bonds to this company and his long term perspectives are non-existent. Thus no need to ride out the storm. Instead run, gain momentum and jump to the next one.

The intricate multitude of values and social attachments are deconstructed into zeroes and ones which makes it is easy to fit into a theory suitable for internet based software. Thus are part of the essentials for building a civil society replaced by ignorance freed from requirement.

Meanwhile in a parallel part of the planet is an old home computer from the early 80s living through a renaissance of new crowd funded games. An illustrative example of both the topics in this blogpost is Canabalt. Some six weeks after he released his impressive conversion of Prince of Persia for the Commodore 64, Mr.SID came with his conversion of Canabalt for the same platform. Another version, entitled C64anabalt, was released by Paulko64 as part of the RGCD 16KB Cartridge Game Development Competition a week later. The purpose of the game is to get the constantly running businessman as far as possible and both adaptations provides an instant fix and attentional gameplay. It is shallow albeit most entertaining.

Market economy and an open society is dependent on a social fabric built from generations behind and cannot in any way rely solely on short term venture capital buildings. That is for instance why family owned businesses tend to last also through tougher periods. They are built with a solid structure on a real foundation in order to keep the above mentioned escapism at bay.

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants"(Sir Isaac Newton)

"you chose to act as if you had never been molded into civil society and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you."(Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France)

"Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve"(Sir Karl Popper)

Liberty is, of course, a loftier goal. But only those who have never known disorder fail to grasp that [order] is the necessary precondition for liberty."(Niall Ferguson in Colossus)

"When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude."(Theodore Dalrymple in What is Poverty?)

"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. // We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."(Sir Karl Popper on the paradox of freedom in The Open Society and Its Enemies)

"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. // The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them."(Thomas Sowell in Is Reality Optional?)

"Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop."

(G.K. Chesterton in Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State)

"to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress."(The aim of The Economist)"This is the lesson: Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."(Sir Winston Churchill, October 29th 1941, Harrow School , London)